We’ve shared many times that social media is a powerful tool to promote your business. Companies large and small are turning away from more traditional marketing channels and towards social media. This is great, because it further demonstrates that social media is a smart place for you to be, but it also shows that social media is becoming a crowded place, where it’s getting more difficult to get your message seen. To deal with these issues, you need to take a strategic approach to social media marketing to ensure that your efforts are worth their time. Read on for guidelines to build the right social media strategy for you.

Networks

Being strategic with your time and planning means not being on every single network. Identify which social media networks make sense for you to market on. One way to do this is to identify who you are trying to reach and match them with a market. Are you trying to reach domain savvy, younger individuals? Twitter may be the right network for you. Are you trying to reach stay at home parents and middle aged users? Facebook may be the right match. It’s important to follow specific network guidelines and best practices to better identify what networks you should be marketing on.

Skills

Are you an experienced videographer or do you absolutely hate seeing and hearing yourself on screen? That’s an easy question you can ask yourself tied to skills. Your answer will decide whether video should be part of your social media strategy or not. Identify what things you excel at, maybe it’s writing. That would mean blogging should be part of your strategy. Outside of simply using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more, what special skills do you have? Find a way to work them into a strategy. For example, maybe you’re a whiz in photoshop–use powerful images to help your social media marketing strategy.

Goals

Goals can be the biggest part of your strategy decisions. You need to know what you want to accomplish before you can build a winning strategy. Do you want more followers? That’s great, but why? Many people get caught up in the popularity of social media–trying to gain friends and followers–but don’t go farther than that to ask themselves what they hope to get from these friends and followers. Rather than having such a general goal, consider setting more specific goals tied to your business. For example, set the goal of having a certain number of people clicking the link to your website or set the goal of have x number of followers from your home town, which means they could actually go to your brick and mortar business.

Tools

Free tools can help make your social media marketing a bit easier. Many of us don’t have time to be on Facebook or Twitter all day, but it’s necessary to be aware of what’s going on on these networks to do your best marketing. To combat this, use free services like TweetDeck or HootSuite. These allow you to schedule content on multiple social networks as well as monitor your profiles for you when you’re not around so you can see who is talking about you or posting about you at all hours.

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